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Science Men have determined that all the humans with blue eyes descend from a single individual who went mutant sometime around 6000 years ago.

“Originally, we all had brown eyes,” says Science Man Hans Eiberg, referencing the numbingly boring and stultifyingly sterile eons before the advent of blueness. “This is what is meant by, ‘and the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.'”

But then there in Europe a woman mutated her OCA2 gene, putting the brakes on the melanin flowing into her eyes. Only some of the melanins did she allow to seep into her eyes, rather than all of them. And thus were made her brown eyes, blue.

The woman’s name was Crystal Blue Persuasion, and she passed on her mutation to her children, of which today there are approximately 300 million.

“The question really is,” asks Science Man John Hawks, “‘Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago, to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?'” And he answers: “This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids.”

Say what? Somehow Hawks, nor any other Science Man, then did explain just how it is that blue eyes cause the humans to go fruitful, and multiply.

Leonard Cohen would have been 83 today, except he died last year, on November 7, the day before the Americans went to the polls, Cohen vacating the corporeal container because he did not want to live in a world of Mongo.

Cohen had foreseen Mongo: that is why the title of his last album was You Want It Darker. The Americans did; Cohen didn’t. So, he moved on.

“You aren’t going to like what comes after America,” Cohen also said, referencing those portions of the planet, including the United States, descending, de-evolving, into Mongoism.

But although he is gone, before he left, Cohen shared The Answer, to The Mysteries. Revealed, there, below.

As the humans continue to evolve, they are increasingly recognizing the rights of creatures other than themselves.

Thus, a New York judge recently granted a writ of habeas corpus to two chimpanzees seeking to free themselves from medical experiments at some torture facility on Long Island.

Similarly, and also in New York, the United Nations this week permitted a baboon to address those delegates assembled.

The baboon displayed many aggressive behaviors—screeching, yawning, showing his teeth—but was prevented by main force from grabbing and biting the female delegates, as baboons are wont to do.

The baboon identified himself as Mongo, Supreme Leader of the United States, and the general consensus was that the animal is rabid. In his address, the baboon shrieked that he would “totally destroy” a nation of 25 million people, North Korea, and also threatened to go ape in the nations of Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. He ceaselessly thumped his chest about his “biglys,” and keened endlessly about “nationalism,” “sovereignty,” and other concepts embraced only by those with shoe-sized IQs. He quoted from some baboon book about how “if the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph.” He screamed that all the mud people must stay away from the shores of his baboonery, so as not to soil the whiteness of his United States.

At one point the baboon said: “The government masks a corrupt dictatorship behind the false guise of a democracy. It has turned a wealthy country with a rich history and culture into an economically depleted rogue state whose chief exports are violence, bloodshed and chaos. The longest-suffering victims of its leaders are, in fact, its own people.”

Goodness, those assembled murmured. He’s talking about himself, and his own country.

Then all those assembled commenced singing “Whiskey River Take My Mind” at top volume, so they would not have to hear any more badness. The baboon continued to screech, into the helpless void.

Early last November, just before Election Day, Barack Obama was driven through the crisp late-night gloom of the outskirts of Charlotte, as he barnstormed North Carolina on behalf of Hillary Clinton. He was in no measure serene or confident. The polls, the “analytics,” remained in Clinton’s favor, yet Obama, with the unique vantage point of being the first African-American President, had watched as, night after night, immense crowds cheered and hooted for a demagogue who had launched a business career with blacks-need-not-apply housing developments in Queens and a political career with a racist conspiracy theory known as birtherism. During his speech in Charlotte that night, Obama warned that no one really changes in the Presidency; rather, the office “magnifies” who you already are. So if you “accept the support of Klan sympathizers before you’re President, or you’re kind of slow in disowning it, saying, ‘Well, I don’t know,’ then that’s how you’ll be as President.”

Donald Trump’s ascent was hardly the first sign that Americans had not uniformly regarded Obama’s election as an inspiring chapter in the country’s fitful progress toward equality. Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, had branded him the “food-stamp President.” In the right-wing and white-nationalist media, Obama was, variously, a socialist, a Muslim, the Antichrist, a “liberal fascist,” who was assembling his own Hitler Youth. A high-speed train from Las Vegas to Anaheim that was part of the economic-stimulus package was a secret effort to connect the brothels of Nevada to the innocents at Disneyland. He was, by nature, suspect. “You just look at the body language, and there’s something going on,” Trump said, last summer. In the meantime, beginning on the day of Obama’s first inaugural, the Secret Service fielded an unprecedented number of threats against the President’s person.

And so, speeding toward yet another airport last November, Obama seemed like a weary man who harbored a burning seed of apprehension. “We’ve seen this coming,” he said. “Donald Trump is not an outlier; he is a culmination, a logical conclusion of the rhetoric and tactics of the Republican Party for the past ten, fifteen, twenty years. What surprised me was the degree to which those tactics and rhetoric completely jumped the rails.”

For half a century, in fact, the leaders of the G.O.P. have fanned the lingering embers of racial resentment in the United States. Through shrewd political calculation and rhetoric, from Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to the latest charges of voter fraud in majority-African-American districts, doing so has paid off at the ballot box. “There were no governing principles,” Obama said. “There was no one to say, ‘No, this is going too far, this isn’t what we stand for.’ ”

Abandoning the customary dog whistle of previous Republican culture warriors, President Trump made plain his indulgent sympathy for neo-Nazis, Klan members, and unaffiliated white supremacists, who marched with torches, assault rifles, clubs, and racist and anti-Semitic slogans through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia. One participant even adopted an isis terror tactic, driving straight into a crowd of people peaceably demonstrating against the racists. Trump had declared an “America First” culture war in his Inaugural Address, and now—as his poll numbers dropped, as he lost again and again in the courts and in Congress, as the Mueller investigation delved into his miserable business history, as more and more aides leaked their dismay—he had cast his lot with the basest of his base. There were some “very fine people” among the white nationalists, he said, and their “culture” should not be threatened.

Who could have predicted it? Anyone, really. Two years ago, the Daily Stormer, the foremost neo-Nazi news site in the country, called on white men to “vote for the first time in our lives for the one man who actually represents our interests.” Trump never spurned this current of his support. He invited it, exploited it.

When Trump was elected, there were those who considered his history and insisted that this was a kind of national emergency, and that to normalize this Presidency was a dangerous illusion. At the same time, there were those who, in the spirit of patience and national comity, held that Trump was “our President,” and that “he must be given a chance.” Has he had enough of a chance yet? After his press conference in the lobby of Trump Tower, when he ignored the scripted attempts to regulate his impulses and revealed his true allegiances, there can be no doubt about who he is. This is the inescapable fact: on November 9th, the United States elected a dishonest, inept, unbalanced, and immoral human being as its President and Commander-in-Chief. Trump has daily proven unyielding to appeals of decency, unity, moderation, or fact. He is willing to imperil the civil peace and the social fabric of his country simply to satisfy his narcissism and to excite the worst inclinations of his core followers.

—David Remnick

All it takes to reduce support for housing assistance among Donald Trump supporters is exposure to an image of a black man.

That’s the takeaway from a new study by researchers Matthew Luttig, Christopher Federico, and Howard Lavine, set to be published in Research & Politics. In a randomized survey experiment, the trio of researchers exposed respondents to images of either a white or black man. They found that when exposed to the image of a black man, white Trump supporters were less likely to back a federal mortgage aid program. Favorability toward Trump was a key measure for how strong this effect was.

The study is just the latest to show that racial attitudes are a powerful predictor for support for Trump. Previous studies have found that racial resentment was a much stronger indicator of support for Trump than views about the economy. And other research has shown that priming people to think about race can make them more conservative on a host of issues.

This latest study is notable, though, because all it uses is an image of a black man to produce its results. That suggests that Trump has a powerful incentive to get people to keep thinking about race: If his most ardent supporters just need a slight racial cue to come around to his conservative policy views, then Trump simply has to bring up race to get his supporters fired up for him.

—German Lopez

Trump voters are very complex. They are conservatives who believe big government is getting out of hand. They want lower taxes for the middle class. They believe in comprehensive immigration reform. They want an economic policy that reflects the average . . .  

Nah, I’m just bullshitting. They just don’t like black people.

According to Vox, they could be triggered by a photograph of a black person. Although I don’t like the word “snowflake,” when a Trump voter sees a black person, they could change all their political values. Now, I’m not saying they are racist, but . . .  

OK, I’m saying they are racist.

More specifically, a new study (pdf) by political scientists at Colgate and the University of Minnesota proves they have racist tendencies. That’s not just a popular opinion; it is a statistical fact.

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